It's never to early to prepare for COVID-19
If you do something only when cases start rising, you're already too late.
Listening to the CBC Radio news on Tuesday night, I thought the announcer used some interesting wording when talking about Prince Edward Island ordering its people to mask up when they’re in indoor public spaces like stores and offices. He said that P.E.I. was bringing in this measure “even though” it hasn’t reported any new COVID-19 infections in several days.
To which I thought, yeah, that’s the whole point. COVID-19 cases are on the rise in the rest of the Canada - even inside the vaunted “Atlantic Bubble” - and as Nunavut is showing, you can go from no cases at all to one or two to an exponential growth in almost no time flat. The virus takes several days to incubate and for symptoms to appear, so waiting until infections rise to do something misses the point completely.
Some American states that resisted mask mandates are realizing this, way too late. (They’re all run by Republican Governors, of course. Democratic Governors institute tough policies to stop the spread of COVID-19 - for you commoners, anyway.)
Since Covid-19 hit US shores, Republican governors in the Upper Midwest and Northern Plains have largely taken a hands-off approach. The results of that strategy have been poor.
When adjusted for population, no states have had more new Covid-19 infections, hospitalizations and deaths over the past seven days than North and South Dakota. The nearby states of Iowa, Wyoming, Nebraska and Idaho are not far behind.
This surge has pushed hospitals to the brink even as businesses have struggled to keep up a healthy work force. In response, several of these governors have acknowledged the failures of their permissive strategies and pushed for stricter health rules and mask mandates to prevent the virus's spread.
"We've relied on people to be responsible," Wyoming Gov. Mark Gordon said Friday, "and they're being irresponsible."
[…]
Gov. Kim Reynolds, a Republican who assumed office in 2017, has resisted mask mandates and shutdowns for months.
Last month, she attended a Trump rally without a mask, violating her own rules on gatherings. She has ignored increasingly dire warnings from the White House coronavirus task force to institute a mask mandate over the past few months.
Now, Iowa is behind only the Dakotas in its measure of new coronavirus cases when adjusted for population, and the state has the fourth-highest number of people hospitalized per capita. Its seven-day positivity rate is more than 50%, behind just South Dakota and Wyoming.
And so on Monday, Reynolds overcame her resistance and instituted a new health order requiring masks indoors and further limiting indoor gatherings to 15 people.
Even Sweden is backing off its vaunted herd-immunity strategy. Here in Canada, it looks like the smallest province is learning from other jurisdictions’ mistakes, and acting accordingly.
Jonathan Rauch, in Persuasion, on Team Trump’s strategy of flooding the zone with BS and hoping people get confused and unsure of what to believe:
Do the Republicans really think the election was an intricately coordinated fraud perpetrated in multiple states? There is no evidence that this happened, or even could have.
Do they seriously expect the courts to overturn the result? Legal experts say the chances are infinitesimal. A few narrow claims of miscounts or procedural glitches might stand, but all the charges of fraud on a scale large enough to change the result have been fabrications.
Unfortunately, a more sinister interpretation better fits the facts. What Trump and his supporters are up to should be thought of not as a litigation campaign that is likely to fail, but as an information-warfare campaign that is likely to succeed—and, indeed, is succeeding already. More specifically, they are employing a tactic called “the firehose of falsehood.” This information-warfare technique, according to researchers at the RAND Corporation, is marked by “high numbers of channels and messages and a shameless willingness to disseminate partial truths or outright fictions.”
After Russian agents poisoned Sergei Skripal and his daughter in Britain in 2018, Kremlin-controlled media blamed Britain. And/or Ukraine. And/or it was an accident. And/or it was suicide. And/or it was a revenge killing by relatives. And/or Russia did not produce the nerve agent that was used. And/or an entirely different nerve agent was used. The Washington Post, which published a flowchart of Russia’s kaleidoscopic inventions, summarized what the propagandists were up to: “They fling up swarms of falsehoods, concocted theories, and red herrings, intended not so much to persuade people as to bewilder them.”
Unlike more traditional forms of propaganda, the firehose of falsehood does not aim primarily at persuading the public of something that is false (although this is a welcome result). Rather, it floods the information environment with so many lies, half-truths and theories that the public becomes disoriented, confused and distrustful of everyone.
While the bulk of firehose claims are false or misleading, even mutually contradictory, a skilled propagandist may salt the mix with statements that are partly valid, lending apparent plausibility to the rest. The bewildering panoply of true and false, rumor and conspiracy, lawsuits and countersuits, all work toward the main objectives: to undermine legitimate authorities, polarize and fracture society, and open the door to cynicism and demagoguery.
The firehose works—not all the time, not on everyone, but dangerously often. A 2017 study found that around 10% to 20% of the public believed a variety of fake-news reports, such as the false claim that the pope had endorsed Trump for president, or that the Clinton Foundation had spent $137 million on illegal arms purchases. Importantly, two to three times as many respondents were unsure about the claims. They didn’t know what they could believe—itself a victory for the propagandists.
Trump has often been dismissed as a would-be authoritarian whose saving grace is his incompetence. That may be true in some respects, but at disinformation he is ambitious and skilled. …
The goal isn’t to make you think Trump won the election and that the “deep state” is trying to take him down. It’s to get you to give up on thinking about it at all, because it’s just so confusing.
A guy who produced pseudo-legal “sovereign citizen” videos in (where else?) Florida was murdered by one of his own followers, who blamed him for failing to get her kids back:
A Florida man who questioned government authority over individuals living in the U.S. through an online forum was fatally shot, allegedly by a woman who has espoused similar “sovereign citizen” views, police said Tuesday.
The Marion County Sheriff’s Office said in a news release that Neely Petrie-Blanchard was arrested in Georgia one day after the killing of Christopher Hallett in his Ocala-area home. Witnesses to the shooting said Petrie-Blanchard accused Hallett of working with the government to deny her custody of her children.
Hallett, 50, ran an entity called E-Clause LLC that featured a Facebook page filled with documents, graphics and articles about whether governments have authority in many instances over individuals. This viewpoint is frequently summarized as the “sovereign citizen” movement.
Petrie-Blanchard, who turns 34 on Thursday, was being held without bail Tuesday in a jail in Lowndes County, Georgia. It was not clear if she had a lawyer to represent her.
Lowndes County Sheriff Ashley Paulk said Petrie-Blanchard, after her arrest, began questioning whether his office had authority to detain her.
“She’s one of these people who claim they’re not part of the United States – sovereign people,” Paulk said. “They don’t believe any of the laws apply to them. Obviously, she’s not leaving.”
In another twist, court records in Logan County, Kentucky, show Petrie-Blanchard was indicted by a grand jury Tuesday on charges related to the abduction last March of her twin daughters from their grandmother’s home. Petrie-Blanchard only had permission for supervised visits.
When Kentucky authorities were searching for the two girls, they said Petrie-Blanchard was driving a Fort Escape with a license plate that read, “ECLAUSE,” according to an Amber Alert issued at the time.
To be fair to the Great State of Florida, one of their judges was an absolute master at dealing with sovereign-citizen nonsense in his courtroom. I wish I had this kind of patience.
Covid-19canada.com shows 17 Maritime Canadian cases tonight, including Newfoundland; 5 in NS; and 9 in New Brunswick. It’s rising...
“Even though”...let’s see. Should the driver brake even though he hasn’t hit the telephone pole yet?
After 8-9 months, one would expect the concept to have taken hold. But people seem to have difficulty with the idea of an incubation period and the fact that by the time there are visible signs of disease, it’s too late not just for that person, but also for those with whom they have come into contact. Personally, my household is operating on essential activities only mode apart from one tightly controlled, masked, sanitized social activity. I’m going on the assumption that Christmas and the time before/after may be on lockdown.
The sovereign citizen idea is...interesting. I’m going to read up on that. How curious that this p... [strike that] agent, entity and individual, despite being increasingly confused when the judge uses his [the former’s, not the latter’s] own terminology, is capable of remaining more polite and self-controlled than many people who generally seem more sa... um, have a more conventional view of themselves.
The Judge’s handling of this goes to show that you can deal with almost any person if you find out what makes them tick and work with that. Most people will work with you (to a degree) if you address them with an attitude of basic respect, no matter how different their views are from one’s own.
And having been the target of disinformation, also known as gossip on the small community level, I can attest that disinformation sticks like a tank mine. If someone wishes to get rid of you because you’re too different, make them uncomfortable, or unintentionally interfere with their interests without realizing it, disinformation is effective. When a socially advantaged person points a finger at a socially marginal person, only a small share join them in this. The other 95% don’t know what to think, so they stay away from you, effectively isolating you. The knowledge that sometimes, just one person will reach through that and choose to treat you as a person is what makes such a situation bearable and keeps faith alive in the face of social discrimination.
If we don’t speak up in such cases, our silence may be understood as tacit agreement. For this reason, when faced with disinformation at any level - small-town gossip or national politics - it’s important to say what we think, even and especially when we aren’t sure what is actually true.